This research project aims to critically examine the intricate interplay between the web, war/conflict, media and technology.

We seek to unravel the multifaceted relationships and implications of the context of mediatized warfare/conflict, media theory, and the ever-changing landscapes of creative practices.

Through artistic practice and concept-based research, we undertake visual and sonic investigations surrounding the mediatization of conflict, with a particular focus on found footage, archival material, digital waste, big data, video, photography, drawing, AR/VR, etc., in order to create, disseminate and speculate on how images and aesthetics shape media ecologies and contribute to the debate on conflict, present and future.

Contemporary focus on war and conflict has been debated through several pivotal changes, particularly in the fields of communication and digital technologies in a broad sense. Artists, philosophers, scholars and researchers have in the past years alerted and reacted against injustice and conflict (McGarry et al, 2020) underlining a global instability that comes from poor governance, political and religious transitions, global economic tensions, climate change, etc.

The multiple-sided perspectives on contemporary conflicts demonstrates a tendency for diminishing the potential for “the prevention and resolution of conflict and violence (…)”

(www.un.org, 2024). At the same time, technology has taken its step in the advances of bot-led weapons, cyberattacks, drone wars and the livestreaming of terrorist actions. The different

images recorded by drones and by our smart gadgets alter the perception of war, ergo, the complete consciousness about it.

Authors like Jonathan Crary have taken attention to the internet complex, a digital age that may signify the late capitalist structure demise. Some of these questions are at the centre of our research as we try to grasp the importance of digitally mediated conflict as entangled with the visualization of war. Concepts of «participative warfare» and «connective war» (Asmolov, 2022), «participative war» (Chernobrov, 2020) and «war and watching machine» (Virilio, 1989), extend new visions in how digitization is reshaping and accelerating conflict and its representation.

Resilience to come together and to design a critical inquiry and an active voice about conflict and its mediated presence, is an important reaction against inequality and human suffering. Art as a form of protest can pull world citizens together, mobilizing them to act against oblivion.